Ken Tancock Celebration of Life

There is a shortcut to Martha and Jim’s back yard from mine. When Ken stayed with  Martha and Jim here in Peterborough, that path was very well used. We shared many meals and had lively and interesting discussions about politics and history – especially Cancon – around the dinner table and in the screened porch.  Ken was a man of both ideas and action, politically, philanthropically and in education.  He and some of his teaching colleagues determined that Canadian history was not sufficiently covered in high schools, so they  produced and published resource materials for teachers. As a Canadian studies graduate and enthusiast, I appreciate that. Copies of the teaching materials now reside in the library of the Frost Centre for Canadian Studies at Trent University.  Ken was also interested in flowers and canoeing, wilderness and books. We talked about all of that. When he returned a book to me, he would sometimes say “I read every word”. Ken was inter...

  Chris Travell wrote in an e-mail to Martha:   Your dad was very special to me and had an incredible influence on my life. In the obituary, I smiled to myself when it said: “He took up jogging before it became the rage.”  I'm not sure if your dad ever mentioned it but on three of the history trips I took with him and Mrs. MacDonald, your dad and I went jogging around the Circus Maximus in Rome, the Alhambra Palace  (pictured) in Granada, and up and down Lycabettus in Athens. Those are memories that I will always look back on with incredible fondness. 

Ken met with great success as a teacher partly due to his love of learning and his ability to instill that in his students. He was an educator who never stopped learning. It was always a delight to talk to him about the latest book he read. He was a lifelong advocate for social justice and an unabashed supporter of the Palestinian cause (Photo of Ken in Palestine). Ken was a wonderful conversationalist who enjoyed intelligent debate and was always well (sometimes too well!) prepared. Ken had a rich sense of humour and often had a twinkle in his eye. His infectious laugh was heard many times in the corridors of Laurier CI. He was not a "joke guy" but knew the importance of seeing and living the lighter side of life. Ken was a positive thinker who sought and encouraged the best in people. A prince among men.

Thanks, Dad, for your wonderful family. You picked your parents well. Those original six Tancocks along with their spouses, as well as Dunner and Helen, helped create an incredibly close nucleus that expanded its orbit year after year. That first Christmas gathering at Aunty Paul’s house ended up as a tradition that lasted for decades. Thanks for moving to the Beaches when we were very young. What a great place to grow up. You allowed us the freedom to roam the streets, hop on the Queen streetcars alone at the ages of 6 and 7 and trusted us enough that we could find our way home. Up in flames But that wasn’t the first time that Dad trusted us when maybe he shouldn’t have. Dad showed early on that he was willing to give Martha and me some rope. When Martha was 4 and a half and I was only 3, Mom was in the hospital in labour with Pamela. Dad was babysitting us and because it was my birthday, we were allowed to light a candle for the occasion. After we finished eating, Dad excus...

Before there was an Energizer bunny, there was Dad. One summer morning, we stopped in to visit Mom and Dad at 5 King Street. While we were chatting and having coffee at the kitchen table, Dad jumped up in the middle of the conversation and announced: “Time to cut the lawn.” Behind the mower, he didn’t walk, he sprinted. When it snowed, he buckled on his skis and bushwhacked around the backyard. Sometimes he got it in his head to do odd projects like paint the basement floor yellow, or sand and finish an old door and make it into a table. He lived full throttle.   He could sit still, too. Usually it was in a straight-back chair at the kitchen table, absent-mindedly tapping a cigarette on the rim of an ashtray, scanning the newspaper or absorbed in the pages of a book. If we drifted into his orbit, he’d pelt us with “you should read this!”   He kick started every day with a coffee and the Toronto Star , his daily dose of caffeine and moral outrage. As a devoted NDPer, he w...

  Ken was one of the greatest  teachers who ever lived. That is not an exaggeration. I am a student of history and  as a journalist  I have studied thousands of lives.  Most of us come up short in certain important ways. We are human. So was Ken, who could be impatient with stupidity – that of Napoleon and of a high school principal who had reached his level of incompetence. As we all do if we fail to recognize our limitations. Ken recognized a limitation he had, which is that he vastly preferred teaching to administration. He repeatedly turned down invitations to accept the higher pay and prestige of management. He chose instead to remain in the classroom, spending his entire days with the students who were the future of the country. That was no sacrifice. Ken immediately earned his students’ respect, and drew from many of us our love. We always had the feeling that Ken was having the time of his life in our company. I signed up for Ken’s his...